Let's make prayerful choices whenever we communicate with one another

We now have a motive in the case of this Ramos person who shot up the Maryland newspaper yesterday, killing five and injuring several more. He'd been harboring a rage against the paper since 2011 for an article about him.

And what made him worthy of coverage in 2011? He'd been in legal trouble for social-media stalking of a high school classmate, berating her and with vulgar names and telling her to kill herself. Since that time, he'd made the paper the focus of his harassment activity.

There's apparently no ideological charge to this story. At this point, it doesn't look like politics enters into any aspect of what Ramos has been up to. We ought, then, to be careful, about any kind of "climate of hate" discussions that might arise.

But the somewhat related question of the dark possibilities inherent in social media are definitely relevant here. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. magnify all the elements of human nature generally: extolling of virtue, genuine friendship, support, humor (ranging from wacky to witty to banal to hopelessly corny), sentimentality - and also insecurity, loneliness, envy, and the one that gets amplified the most: touchiness.

In short, it's fertile ground for the Devil to further his grim machinations.

I'm currently reading a book about spiritual warfare. It's teaching me a lot about the real nature of the swirl that goes on pretty much constantly in my own head and heart. I'm gaining significant insights into my proclivity toward anger, and my habitual expectation for things to go wrong. I can see I've been letting the Devil conquer me, over and over.

There's real danger to never understanding that, not only to oneself, but to - well, randomly chosen newspaper reporters, sometimes.

And regarding current news stories that do have an ideological charge, it's dismaying to see that some with whom I generally align are permitting this infection in their own hearts. Maxine Waters has been getting death threats. Yesterday I read about somebody hurling chicken dung at the Red Hen in Virginia.

It's why I have no use for the Kurt Schlichter-style "new rules, bitch" mentality. He himself has written two books warning how close this country is to breaking apart, but I don't think his columns and tweets are doing anything to counter that peril.

It's time we all made the conscious effort to guard our minds, hearts and souls. The distance between keyboard-banging and real damage is shorter than we'd imagined.

Let's choose our words prayerfully. Language is a great gift, but the price for abusing it is great.